I looked around at them, I'm thinking of converting to Intel, and boy there are a lot of options. What's the difference?

I see i5's and i7's are quad core, so same number of cores, just lower cache memory. Is that their main difference? Big price increase for a little bit more cache on the i7's.

I've always used AMD, so I'm not familiar with Intel's per say. Are there some things to know about them for thermal reasons? I want a cool running processor. I see they have different "bridges" which I don't know what those differences are.

What Intel is a good value in performance and heat levels, without being the most expensive they sell?

The main difference between the i5's and i7's are Hyperthreading and L3 cache. Some programs really can show the difference in performance, but others show no difference at all. I get i7's just because, but it is a little bit hard to justify the ~$100 price difference. Examples:

And really, most everyday things and gaming will show no difference in performance. Your call.

Regarding the bridges, Sandy Bridge < Ivy Bridge < Haswell. Each is a new year's iteration, and each successive iteration has about 5-10% more performance than the year before on the CPU front. The GPU side has been growing at a stronger rate, but if you're doing any real gaming, you should look at a dedicated card.

Regarding heat, Intel chips nowadays put out a lot less heat than AMDs of the same performance level. They are pretty easy to cool. That being said, Ivy Bridge and Haswell don't overclock that well. It seems that the 22nm process is geared towards better power consumption instead of overclocking.

If I were building for somebody, I would probably get the i5-4670 (non-K). I think I'm over overclocking, and they don't overclock that well anyways.

There are a few features that the K processors lack. TXT, TSX, VPro and VT-D (not VT-X, they have that). If you were going to run a dedicated virtualization box, or needed the security features of TXT or needed remote management you might care. For 99.9% of home users these missing features are a non-issue.

If you are not going to overclock then you might want to shop around for a non-K processor. That is only for the cost savings, not for the above features. A few of the K processors have a slightly faster clock even at stock speeds, so there is a slight performance advantage to them even when not overclocking.

Could you list what cards you have, there are many boards that will have a lot of PCI slots, jsut not all 16x, even the X79 dont have all full 16X its just the plastic holder, but if you see the soldering in the back you see how many trully 16X you will see, and even then i dont know anyone that needs that many 16X, current high end GPU cant even saturate a PCIe 8x 3.0, thats why Z87 and SLI/Xfire scales so well now a days.

The Socket 2011-platform is a bit outdated. It supposed to be Intel's high-end line, but they haven't updated the chipset in quite a while and the CPUs are one generation behind. (Ivy Bridge-E instead of the newer Haswell).

In my opinion, the platform is just about useless. It has more memory bandwidth, but only .5% of real world use cases will benefit from that. And it has more PCI-E-bandwidth. But PCI-E-bandwidth can be augmented by adding a PLX switch.

So there are a couple mainboards on the 1150 (Haswell) platform that offer just as much PCI-E-bandwidth, rendering Socket 2011 useless.

Could you list what cards you have, there are many boards that will have a lot of PCI slots, jsut not all 16x, even the X79 dont have all full 16X its just the plastic holder, but if you see the soldering in the back you see how many trully 16X you will see, and even then i dont know anyone that needs that many 16X, current high end GPU cant even saturate a PCIe 8x 3.0, thats why Z87 and SLI/Xfire scales so well now a days.

Looks like this board has just as many slots, but fits the FT02 case. Nice.

For my specific uses, looks like going to Intel has an additional advantage. The onboard graphics supports 3 monitors at the same time as the other graphics cards are running. This is new on the Z87 chipset I believe. So I can run fewer firepro cards, as the motherboard can make up for one of them.

I'm looking at the MSI GD45 Gaming, as they have one cheap open-box at Micro Center, for $112 it seems like a good deal.

Looks like System fan controls can do a minimum of 50% on MSI motherboards, or at least on the MPower board. That's 6v I'm guessing. Can't lower it more than that. The 180mm fans spin at 700rpm at that setting. Guess I'm gonna have to do it manually.

Looks like System fan controls can do a minimum of 50% on MSI motherboards, or at least on the MPower board. That's 6v I'm guessing. Can't lower it more than that. The 180mm fans spin at 700rpm at that setting. Guess I'm gonna have to do it manually.

Did you get the sunbeam? voltage 3pin are restricted to 50%, but the CPU_FAN1 and CPU_FAN2 should allow you 12.5%, 25% and 37.5%, thats if the fan can work that low, but this two slots are only PWM headers so they wont reduce 3pins. Either way you are not that far off from the limitation of the AP181s, which is above 400rpms. Asus motherboards would have drop it around 460rpms or so on CHA_FAN headers, but now that you are with MSI, then go manual with fan controller.

Looks like System fan controls can do a minimum of 50% on MSI motherboards, or at least on the MPower board. That's 6v I'm guessing. Can't lower it more than that. The 180mm fans spin at 700rpm at that setting. Guess I'm gonna have to do it manually.

Did you get the sunbeam? voltage 3pin are restricted to 50%, but the CPU_FAN1 and CPU_FAN2 should allow you 12.5%, 25% and 37.5%, thats if the fan can work that low, but this two slots are only PWM headers so they wont reduce 3pins. Either way you are not that far off from the limitation of the AP181s, which is above 400rpms. Asus motherboards would have drop it around 460rpms or so on CHA_FAN headers, but now that you are with MSI, then go manual with fan controller.

I read some reviews on the sunbeam that warned that if you use the PWM function of it, it can eventually die and cause lockups or even non-boot of the motherboard. So I just went the knob way, turned them down quite a bit and they seem pretty quiet (not silent) I'm going to redo my builds though, move my Asus into the FT02 case which has the full fan control on the system fan headers, so this won't be setup this way for very long.

Thanks for the input everyone on the intel processor, I went with the i7 haswell, and I really like it. I'm going to move it into my Fractal Design Define R4 case and then I'll have the option to overclock or whatever if I want to (I probably wont for silencing reasons).

I'm going to redo my builds though, move my Asus into the FT02 case which has the full fan control on the system fan headers, so this won't be setup this way for very long.

Since you own both setups, test it before you move, its very simple, just use a 3pin from the asus motherboard to the Silverstone AP181 of the FT02 (no need to remove all stuff you got 3 fans just use one), connect the AP181 to a CHA_FAN (1,2,3) fan header, run FanXpert2 tunning and check how low its able to drop it. I would do this, as im not sure you will get much quieter, Asus and FanXpert2 has a one thing on their side, and its that the fan start on full rpms on bios, then when windows loads it undervolts it, so fans that wont start at certain voltage benefits from this, but if the fan can start at its minimum voltage then the results will be the same as the fan controller, no gain on moving your setup, at least from the fan side, but test it, this is the fun parts of doing pcs, tweaking and getting it to your personal liking.

Yeah if I turn the fans down any further they wont start with the computer, so I have to keep them a little higher than they are capable of running just so they do initially spin. I guess this is how it is with a manual fan controller.

I'll do as you said when I'm ready to do the move. I'm reconsidering, I got some new information that suggests I might be best off keeping this system for work purposes. I'd thought I could get by with less, but maybe not.

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